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“You hear all these horror stories about somebody thinking, ‘OK, I can store a petabyte of data in Amazon for $250,000 a year.’ But what they don’t know is how much they’re going to touch that data. Then they discover that, ‘Geesh, my egress and API charges are bigger than my storage costs,” says David Friend, CEO and president of cloud storage startup Wasabi Technologies.

Former Carbonite CEO David Friend doesn’t hold back his thoughts on public cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft charging customers exorbitant fees for data egress.

“It insults me when somebody says, ‘Oh, it’s free to put your data in Amazon, but if you want to get it back it’s difficult and expensive,” said Friend, CEO, president and co-founder of cloud storage startup Wasabi Technologies. “Hey, it’s my data. If I want to get it back I should be able to get it back without being ransomed. People hate egress charges and sooner or later people are going to have to get rid of it. … We don’t have egress charges.”

The IT visionary plans to not only disrupt public cloud providers but the entire storage industry itself. “You can store a petabyte of data in Wasabi for less than the annual maintenance on a petabyte of [Dell] EMC storage,” he said. “I don’t know where these guys are going to go in the future.”

Wasabi, who raised $68 million in funding last year, says it provides enterprise class cloud storage for one-fifth the price of cloud vendors and is up to six-times faster with no hidden fee for data egress or API requests. Friend said on average, customers are saving a whopping 80 percent on storage costs when switching to Wasabi.

“You hear all these horror stories about somebody thinking, ‘Okay, I can store a petabyte of data in Amazon for $250,000 a year.’ But what they don’t know is how much they’re going to touch that data. Then they discover that, ‘Geesh, my egress and API charges are bigger than my storage costs,” said Friend.

In an interview with CRN, Friend talks about how Wasabi’s cloud storage disruption strategy, storage costs and the Boston-based startup’s channel future.